A Whole New Soupstack...
Two new soup recipes (Now with Bonus Salad!)
Hello! We hope everyone had a happy new year and hope being back to work isn’t too soul-crushing. We had a lovely little year — though considering 2022 was the year our live show came out of its long hiatus and the year we started this newsletter, I guess it was more of a big year.
All in all, we put on 4 live shows and published 11 newsletters. And hey, that’s pretty cool, especially since we didn’t start any of that until June.
Thanks to all our performers, audience, readers, paid subscribers (join them if you can!) photographers, friends, and supporters who help keep us going. And thanks to Caty, who is an integral part of making sure Stuff Happens here in QnP World.
We hope to see you at our next show on Thursday, January 26 — more info to come!
xoxo Cass + Babz
A Tale of Two Salads
by Cassidy Dawn Graves
One
Not all salads have leaves. Some have lentils — like this smoky, savory lentil and winter squash salad from Smitten Kitchen that I’ve now made at least four times in the last few years. It’s filling, vegetarian, and fairly simple to toss together.
It feels like a fun lil achievement every time something I make becomes a go-to recipe, but this hearty boi feels especially nice because it will always remind me of friends.
The first time I made it (I think?) was the first Thanksgiving of Covid in 2020. Even though I don’t normally go home for Thanksgiving everything still felt so different, obviously. We had just moved to our apartment, and we hosted a dinner our small pod o’ pals. Vibes may have been a strange medley of weird, bad, chaotic, and lovely, but boy did we have plenty to eat.
Babz and I spent like three days cooking. I made Cornish hens for the first time in lieu of turkey whilst tipsy and overwhelmed, I deep fried Buffalo cauliflower, we cooked loads of other things I can’t quite remember; our kitchen was stretched to the brink of its capacity, basically.
Our friends brought their own bounty, too; when the night was over we had too many leftovers to fit in our fridge and we were all so weary from edibles and wine and hosting and pandemic holiday stress that I wasn’t sure we’d find a place for everything. (Ultimately, thankfully, we did.)
The squash, lentil, and goat cheese salad was merely a small part of this madness, but it began a precedent that would continue over the years. I initially chose to make it so my plant-based pals (and whoever else) had a substantial option that had both protein and side dish vibes. Turns out, that kind of thing comes in handy again and again.
Plus, since you use the squash interior as well as the seeds, it’s a nice way to make the most of what you buy, just like our communal meals helped us make the best of an uncertain and isolating situation. One might also say…. it helped squash any bad vibes………..
Two
There’s something leisurely and luxurious about salad-making. It seems simple — look ma, no cooking! — but all that chopping and slicing can take a deceptively long time. Sometimes it’s nice to lean into it, but life doesn’t always allow for such leafy idleness.
This is probably why they make those salads in a bag. Salad kits (which sounds like something you assemble by snapping plastic veggies to a bowl, or something you bring if you’re afraid something might happen to your container of spring mix) are a popular and convenient way to, well, eat a salad without spending $16 on a fast-casual “creation.”
Popular as they may be, these aren’t items Babz and I buy often.
Nevertheless, we ended up with one a month or so ago, a Southwestern-type deal with pepitas and little cheese cubes that probably should’ve come with cilantro. It languished in our fridge for probably weeks, to be honest. It felt too easy and unsatisfying to just eat it as-is.
I came up with the idea to try air-frying some of the tofu I had left (I press, cut, and freeze blocks of firm tofu and defrost as needed) in some appropriately-flavored marinade but even with that decided, we still procrastinated on using this dang bag of leaves.
One day, probably as a way to put off doing something else, I finally relented. We needed food and Babz didn’t have much time before work: The perfect crunch time.
I had googled around for ~southwestern style~ tofu marinades and found a random one for chili lime tofu nuggets that sounded good. I mixed it up, defrosted tofu, dipped it in there and chucked it in our air fryer toaster oven for slightly less time than the recipe called for.
Because I cut my tofu fairly thin (I hate when there’s a flavorful outside and bland interior due to the pieces being too thick) they crisped up decently anyway, and honestly they tasted sooo good. That marinade paste stuff is solid. Babz has been very tofu-hesitant, esp crispy tofu, and they really enjoyed it!
As for the salad, it was perfectly serviceable, and was in quite fresh condition considering it was sitting in our fridge for so long. I’m glad it didn’t go to waste, and it was a fun combination of lazy convenience food and cooking something new. Somehow that was my first time air frying tofu, and it surely shan’t be my last.
Soup Hole
By Babz
CW: descriptions of disordered eating.
Hello, my name is Babz, and I make soup when I am stressed.
Which is every Holiday season, to be honest with you, but this year really hit me where it hurts. Family drama, bank account woes, being perfectly thoughtful but not gauche in your gift giving, travel woes — the list never ends and every year I check it, like, eight times.
I promise I’m no scrooge. Actually, despite the compounding stressors, I sincerely enjoy the holiday season.
I like the way that people go out of their way to be nice to each other, even if it is out of some strange sense of Stockholm Syndrome. I like the pretty lights, the smell of Balsam firs on the sidewalk, even the relentless sound of jingle bells.
Having to be a service worker with the same 34 songs on repeat I could live without, but hey, there’s something undeniably satisfying about finally knowing all the words to the song everyone else is singing.
There is one thing that always does get to me during the holidays that I’m sure I’m not alone in, and that, dear friends, is the inevitable resurgence of my past habits of disordered eating.
I grew up in a household that counted calories. My mother, a nurse and marathon runner, was always on one diet or another (does South Beach ring any bells?). I have this memory of her literally cackling one night after dinner as she slurped down a cup of chocolate pudding topped with skim milk as a dessert – the only serving of sugars she was allowed in a day.
Listen, in no way am I saying my mom ever did a Debra McCurdy — despite my mom feeling like she needed to diet and obviously under-eating at times, she never encouraged myself or my sister to do the same and always fed us well. Maybe my mom was even vicariously eating through us.
When you’re a kid, though, it’s impossible to not absorb your parents' behaviors, and despite what God knows is your best efforts to not become your parents (and their best efforts to not let you repeat their own mistakes) you wind up mirroring them anyway.
My own relationship to my body was further complicated by what I now recognize as a gender identity crisis, and just being on the Spectrum. Plus, Gay Culture™ and the Queer as Folk effect.
When it came to the Holidays, and the obligatory food binge that comes with it, there was always an elevated level of stress around the food in question and the diet and exercise required to burn it off.
Calories in, calories out. You know, erm, science?
It’s that history and more that has led me to this wonderful habit of getting up on a cold, cloudy December day, going to the fridge to look inside, staring for a good 90 seconds and closing it again.
And again. And again. And Again.
Until it’s 6pm and I get so ravenously hungry that I eat a plate of Tostitos smothered with Cracker Barrel Cheddar with half a jar of salsa, a family-sized bag of pretzels, a pepperoni pizza Hot Pocket, and then a Chorizo Burrito… which is just an ungodly amount of cheese and gluten unfit for any human body to consume in one sitting lest you suffer the very serious consequences. And I always do.
This is where soup comes in — I know, I made you wait and suffer for it.
The Number One Most Effective Way for me to prevent this near-daily spiral is to have easily prepared and premade safety foods. Soup is my most Holy and Revered Safety Food; it is easy to make, easy to pack full of veggies, easy to keep in the fridge for extended periods of time, easy to dress up with an egg or some yogurt, etc, etc.
Soup has always been there for me when I need something I don’t need to chew. When I’m so late to work that I just need something I can drink on the way. When I am looking in my fridge at 1pm, and know it’s now or never. It’s in that spirit that I offer you these two soup recipes so that you too can have something soooo simple that even the Stress Brain can’t turn it down.
It’s Finally Over Turkey Soup
Great way to get rid of a turkey carcass without having to throw it in the trash. Turkey carcasses (and spiral ham bones) are easily frozen for later use. You can make broth from them (see Cassidy's substack post about broth making). Or you can just use chicken broth and the leftover turkey meat or store-bought ground turkey. She's not fussy!
Ingredients:
One turkey carcass OR 1lb ground turkey
3 carrots chopped
3 celery stalks chopped
1 medium onion chopped
6 cups of turkey or chicken broth
1 cup rice of your choosing (I went with wild rice, bc I was thinking about this Panera soup I had a lot as a kid)
5 sprigs of time
2 sprigs of rosemary
1 bay leaf
¼ cup of cream (optional but it do make the broth very rich and lovely) .
If you’re using ground turkey, add that to a soup pot preheated over medium-high heat. Cook until brown, breaking the meat up in the process. Remove from the pot and reserve for later.
Deglaze the pan with a little broth and cook down until the liquid is uniformly a caramel color. Sauté your veggies all together over medium heat in the same pot, until they soften (about 7-10 minutes). Add salt and pepper to taste in the process.
When the veggies are ready add your broth, and let it come to a boil. Toss in your herbs (I suggest bundling them for easier removal). Add the rice. Add the meat back in, or if using leftover turkey, chopped or tear finely and add now. If you made your stock from turkey scraps, add back in the meat you would have strained out.
Cover, turn heat down to low and let the soup simmer, covered for about 45 minutes. Remove the lid and make sure the rice has softened.
Turn off the heat, add your quarter cup of cream and serve. I would leave the spice bundle in the leftovers overnight to let the flavor develop further. **Forgive me for not taking pictures of my soups**
Fuhget About It Italian Chickpeas
This is a vegetarian take on an old favorite of mine from Bertucci's that I thicken with blended chickpeas and aquafaba veggie broth. You can exclude the mozzarella to make it vegan but I recommend replacing it with about a tablespoon of nutritional yeast to add a cheesy flavor.
2 15oz cans of chickpeas, with liquid
½ a fennel bulb
1 medium onion
5 cloves of garlic, crushed
4 cups of veggie broth
1 tbsp of fennel seed
1 tbsp Italian Seasoning
½ tbsp Crushed Red Pepper
1 tsp cumin
A grocery store bag of spinach
Handful of freshly grated mozzarella or 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
Prep your fennel by removing the stalks, slicing off the root, and roughly chopping the bulb.
Dice your onion. Sauté in olive oil until fragrant.
Add your crushed garlic and sauté for another 5-7 minutes.
Add in your broth, chickpeas, and seasonings. Bring it to a boil.
Let that simmer for about a half hour.
Remove about a third of the soup and put it in a blender. Blend until smooth and return to the soup. This will thicken your concoction.
While the heat is still on, add your spinach and let it simmer for 2-3 minutes.
Turn off the heat — if you’re using nutritional yeast you can stir that in now.
If you are using mozzarella, ladle the soup into bowls and add it on top of each individual serving (there’s really nothing worse than stringy, reheated mozzarella that sticks to the spoon).
Garnish with fennel fronds and enjoy :3